Steam Holiday Auction Shut Down After Gem Exploits

Steam was implementing a new Holiday Auction -- get rid of your old, out-dated items and earn gems to win one of 200,000 games, until people got greedy.

IGN reports that Steam was giving its users the chance to bid on almost 200,000 different games by trading in their old items such as trading cards, backgrounds, and emoticons for gems. Considering how many games drop trading cards just for playing them, this seems like a pretty dandy deal that Steam has made. However, like most things on the Internet, the good didn't last very long. Kotaku reports that Steam shut the system down after gamers was exploiting the gem-creation process. Luckily, Steam ironed out all the kinks and reopened the auction a while later.

As you can imagine, as soon as people heard of something trying to do something good for its community, they thought up ways to ruin it. People have reportedly been finding ways to inflate the amount of gems they earn as well as other sneaky ways to get around building their gem army in preparation for the auction. Then, they post their newly hatched plans on forums for other people to copy, which ruins the experience for everyone.

The Holiday Auction was supposed to officially start on Dec. 15 and run through the 18, but we'll see if Steam extends the auction for its downtime.